“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
—Thomas Jefferson
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."
—FDR, 1936
Thomas Jefferson might not have been the nearly perfect President and Founding Father the way that I was taught in the old school days. We know and accept that he was limited in some ways, and full of paradoxes. He was a slaveowner, even while writing all of those stirring words about freedom and breaking free.
However, he undeniably possessed a very brilliant mind. did understand the very real threat that the elite class - monied corporations and the aristocracy, which seems to be reviving in the United States in the 21st century - imposed on the young, fledgling American democracy.
More than one century later, another president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said many of these same kinds of things. Roosevelt's New Deal policies are often credited with building the American middle class and ushering in a long era of national prosperity, which many Americans still today consider the American "Golden Age."
Some of those words and thoughts are things which we might want to pay attention to in our modern age. Because it feels like history is running in cycles. Or perhaps it is a pendulum.
But here in the United States, that pendulum has been stuck going in the corporate, elitist direction for a very, very long time now. It appears to be stuck in that position, at least for now.
Maybe we should go back and reread the words of Jefferson and Roosevelt to better understand his position regarding monied interests and corporations. Specifically, the threat that they posed to our American democracy. Because while he wrote those words hundreds of years ago, they somehow feel quite relevant to our present time and circumstances.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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